She is not a Rose West

Adam Lusher reports on how Harold Shipman's loyal wife Primrose is living now

12:01AM GMT 18 Jan 2004

It could hardly be more lonely, and at the same time more exposed. Its brickwork poking through the peeling pebbledash, the cottage sits almost marooned, hemmed in by a flyover and, just 10ft away, one of Britain's busiest roads.

Only a threadbare hedge shields the ivy-encrusted walls from the incessant traffic of the A1. The thundering never stops. The windows have wooden frames: there isn't even the protection of double glazing.

The knock (there is no bell), is reluctantly answered.

The bespectacled, 32-year-old man fires a staccato, almost robotic volley of anger, anguish, and exhaustion.

"WHO ARE YOU? GO AWAY."

Christopher Shipman, at least, has not deserted his mother Primrose.

This, then, is the hiding place of the 56-year-old who has gone from respected GP's wife to "one of the most notorious women in Britain".

Here, on this unlovely edge of the hamlet of Walshford, North Yorkshire, is the woman condemned to a middle age as the "dumpy", "waddling" and "dim-witted" - but loyal - "wife of Dr Death".

Last week the wife became the widow. "Dr Death", Harold Shipman, hanged himself in Wakefield prison.

Thirty miles away, in Walshford, near Wetherby, Mrs Shipman found herself besieged. Locals spoke of journalists attempting to clamber into the back garden. When the police arrived, they had to pass their identification badges through the letterbox. Only then did Primrose Shipman feel safe enough to leave to identify her husband's body.

"They were surrounding the house like Indians around the wagon train," said one 60-year-old local man. "What has she done? Tell me what her crime is. Then you can go and hound her."

She may indeed have been convicted of no crime. It will never quell the anger that surfaced again last week, especially when it emerged that Mrs Shipman will receive an NHS "survivor's package", understood to be a tax-free lump sum of about £98,000 and an annual pension of £16,000.

Shipman was barred from receiving any pension, but there were fears that, calculating to the last, the murderer had spotted nothing had been done to stop his widow receiving money.

Had he killed himself a day before his 58th birthday simply to extract the maximum amount for her?

"Dying at 60 or before would maximise the lump sum," a Department of Health spokesman admitted. "After 60 it decreases on a sliding scale until at 65 there is just the pension."

He added that in 2002 officials had considered stopping Mrs Shipman getting money, but "she was not implicated in his crimes, therefore she is innocent, I suppose".

It's a rare supposition. Many insist she must have realised what was happening. How dare she, they demand, visit him in jail every Saturday to hold his hand and call him "my dearest"? When would she apologise to the victims and admit publicly that her husband of 37 years, the father of her four children, was a mass murderer?

In vain a family friend insisted: "She is urbane, articulate and intelligent. She is not a Myra Hindley. She is not a Rose West. She is not even a Maxine Carr."

To most she is a frumpy, "barely literate" pariah. There has been much gleeful observation that she has gained at least four stone since her husband's conviction, perhaps, the gossips suggest, because of over-indulgence in the chocolates she insisted on handing round during the trial.

Her cottage, meanwhile, has been portrayed as "like a witch's house in a terrifying fairytale".

"She is going to become a hate icon in the same way as Myra Hindley and Maxine Carr," said Corinne Sweet, a psychologist who has tried to explain Mrs Shipman's seemingly inexplicable devotion.

"We will now displace on to her our hatred for Shipman, and we hate women a lot more than we hate men. We find it very difficult to stomach when a woman, a mother, supports a murderer."

The key to her blind devotion, Ms Sweet said, may lie in the truncated courtship of Primrose Oxtoby and Harold Shipman. When she appeared at the registry office, the bride was 17 years old and six months pregnant. No friends of the "happy couple" were present. Her Methodist parents were horrified. From the start, Harold and Primrose were together against the world.

"He saved her," said Ms Sweet. "She was young, shy, and poorly educated. What else did she have but this man? She was utterly dependent on him."

It made Primrose's denial understandable, and - despite the demonising - not so unusual.

"A similar thing happens with women whose husbands are having affairs. They can't face it because it is going to mean the end of family and the end of security.

"Denial is a self-defence mechanism. If Primrose really acknowledged to herself what had happened, it would destroy her. I'm not sure she could stay alive or sane. She would have to accept that her whole life was a sham and she chose to love totally the wrong man."

Unlike her husband's victims, though, Mrs Shipman does have the luxury of being alive, to say nothing of her "survivor's package".

Ms Sweet said: "If you make somebody else very bad, it makes you better. You can split off all the bad things about yourself and project them onto the hate object.

"It's sadistic. The irony is that Shipman was sadistic, but we are sadistic back. It's a return to our primitive state where we want to kick somebody who's bleeding, to stone them. We want to hate Primrose and publicly humiliate her. What kind of life can she ever have?"

As it happens, Mrs Shipman may have chosen as well as she could with her latest refuge, her fourth in four years. Walshford, which amounts to about a dozen houses, seems notable for its anonymity and little else.

It was only months after she moved in, when newspapers exposed her latest address - again - that most realised the identity of the private, if perfectly civil woman in the cottage. Even then, it seems many did little more than shrug. Easily inflamed "community spirit" is hard to find.

In his farm shop, Jeff Sharp, 59, admitted: "We get a lot of people in transit. People move into this area to come out of the way."

He paused. "She's had to come here to get away, hasn't she? Poor lass."

Poor lass. In Walshford, it was still possible.

At the Bridge Inn, at the only table not being used by passing businessmen discussing sales figures, Tom, 23, told how one reporter badly misjudged the mood when he sought vilification.

"The locals nearly lynched him.

"Everybody round here thinks the poor woman should be left to grieve. Whatever she did or didn't know, she has just lost her husband. Show some humanity."

At the next table, however, it wasn't so simple. Before returning to Wetherby, Donna Schofield, 33, admitted: "I think she deserved to suffer. I can't believe that she could be married to him and not know what was happening."

Despite Mrs Schofield's easy amiability, some words were spat out.

"She's a sad, pathetic individual."

At the bar, it was still possible to read the headline in a discarded newspaper: "The families destroyed by the doctor and the woman who stood by him."

The trial of the doctor ended on January 31, 2000. The trial of the woman who stood by him shows no sign of ending.